Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - One In A Million!

Episode Date: February 25, 2013

UC Berkeley SETI researcher Andrew Siemion and his colleagues have put an upper limit on the number of civilizations in our galaxy that are capable of giving us a call. He’ll explain their reasoning and provide other search updates.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Your one in a million, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. It's a remarkable proposition, really. Fewer than one in a million stars in our galaxy hosts a civilization advanced enough to transmit a radio beacon we could hear. Lead author Andrew Simeon will tell us how he and his colleagues arrived at that figure. Bill Nye is on the road this week, but Bruce Betts is here with our weekly look at the night sky and a new space trivia contest. In the lead in a photo finish is Emily Lakdawalla. She has more

than one great new photo to share. Emily, let's start with big news for Curiosity, which has been on Mars now for quite a while, but really is, I guess, still just getting started? Yeah, we're going on. We're very close to the 200th day of the mission. And last week, Curiosity finally completed the very last first time activity. That's what they call all of these engineering operations that makes Curiosity so complex. The very last thing that it had to do for the first time was after it drilled into the Martian rock. It does that in order to create a rock powder that it can put inside of its instruments. Well, there's a crucial step between the drilling and the placing of the instruments, and that's getting the drilled powder up through the drill into the sample chambers and maneuvering it around into a powder that they can actually

put into the analytical instruments. And they finally completed that last week. They got a beautiful photo of the open scoop showing a good-sized pile, about a tablespoon, they said. That's about three cubic centimeters of material. And they actually have now placed the first of those samples inside the Kamin instruments. So it is a big deal for the team. That beautiful image that you mentioned, the first person to point it out to me on your blog entry from February 20th, was our IT guy, Brandon, who was just marveling at how pretty this is. And yet it's just hardware with, oh, no big deal, the Martian surface in the background. Yeah, it is just hardware.

But there's something about the Mastcams and also Mali, which is the same kind of camera. The fact that they're focusable means that you have, like, things that are in the foreground or in crisp, sharp, wonderfully colorful detail. And then you have this soft, out of focus background that just gives these pictures, they're just so much more of an aesthetic quality than we're used to seeing from these Mars science cameras. Every one of them is beautiful to look at. Best picture of hardware and dirt on Mars I've ever seen. Speaking of great pictures or a series of pictures, tell us about this beautiful transit that was captured some time ago. Yeah, this one's kind of a funny contrast because after all, it was taken with a camera that couldn't focus. It was taken with the high

resolution imager on Deep Impact long after its original mission to study a comet. This was taken during a part of its mission when it was studying extrasolar planets. And I actually turned back and looked at our own planet as though it were an extrasolar planet and got this very small but just amazing video showing the moon passing in front of the disk of Earth. And it's the only image like that that I know of. And it's really curious because the moon is so much darker than Earth. We think of it as being this bright object in the sky, but actually it's very dark and it's kind of brown. And it's really curious because the moon is so much darker than Earth. We think of it as being this bright object in the sky, but actually it's very dark, and it's kind of brown. And it's very striking, the contrast between this sort of brown cinder of a world, that's the moon crossing in front of the beautifully colorful Earth. It is a gorgeous sequence.

You really have to see it. It's a February 21st entry in Emily's blog that you can find, of course, at planetary.org. Emily, thanks so much once again. Thank you, Matt. She is a senior editor for the Planetary Society and our planetary evangelist. You can catch her every other Thursday in the Google Plus Hangout that she alternates with Casey Dreyer, another of our colleagues at the Society, and she's a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Bill Nye is on the road this week, so in a moment we'll be jumping directly to one of the newest

in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. That's Andrew Semien of UC Berkeley. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence continues, and that search is getting new tools and new blood. Andrew Semien just earned his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, where he has been contributing to the SETI effort for years. Now he's a project scientist and lead author of a paper that reports on a targeted search for ET. The effort came up

empty-handed, but it provided the basis for a dramatic conclusion about just how many or how few of our sister systems throughout the Milky Way may host a civilization that is wandering, as we do, if they are alone. When I called Andrew via Skype, he was in the Netherlands discussing yet another innovative and unprecedented technique. He'll tell us about that project in a few minutes, and he has even more to say in the podcast version of this week's show. Andrew, it is a great pleasure to welcome you to Planetary Radio, as we have welcomed some of your colleagues in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence in the past. Thanks for joining us.

Thank you very much for having me, Matt. It really is a pleasure to chat with you. I'm not sure if your listeners are aware of this, but the Planetary Society has been absolutely a fantastic supporter of SETI at Berkeley and also SETI at other institutions. And in many ways, I owe my Ph.D. to the Planetary Society in some sense, because were the Planetary Society not to have supported SETI at home at a very early stage, I'm not sure if we would have such a vibrant SETI group at Berkeley.

All right, now, Andrew, did I ask you to give the Planetary Society that testimonial? That was entirely unsolicited, right? No, it was indeed entirely unsolicited, but very heartfelt. Well, thank you very much. That's very, very nice. I'm sure that the boss, Bill Nye, will be very grateful when he hears this. And it has been a pleasure. I am so thrilled to be part of an organization that has been part of this search, as I suspect you must be. I realized yesterday as I was preparing for our conversation,

you represent, I think it's safe to say, the third generation in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. I think that's about right. And actually, you know, Frank Drake, who's the grandfather of SETI, is actually my great-grand-advisor. My Ph.D. advisor was Jeff Bauer. His was Don Backer, who passed away a few years ago. And Don's PhD advisor was actually Frank Drake. And you work with Dan Wertheimer because you're in the shop there at UC Berkeley that originated so much of this work. And co-authors on your paper include Jill Charter, who was just on the show not long ago. It's quite a legacy that you're holding up. Yeah, no, it was great

to have a chance to work with all of those folks. And certainly it was a team effort, and everybody played a very crucial role. So let's talk a little bit about this paper that you are the lead author for, and I guess is about to be published. Where is this coming out? The Astrophysical Journal is kind of the canonical U.S. journal for publishing astronomy results, I suppose. Give us the quick abstract of what you and your colleagues did in this very interesting study. Sure. So what we wanted to do is look at some of these planet candidates that are being found by the Kepler mission. As many of the people that listen to your radio

show probably know, the Kepler mission is a satellite that's looking for planets around other stars via this transit method. It looks for the small decrease in light from a star as a planet passes in front of the star. And it's been fantastically successful at finding planets. It's now found more than 2,000 planet candidates, and the expectation is that something like 99 or 98 percent of those will eventually be vetted as bona fide planets. So just it really has been one of the most successful, if not the most successful, extrasolar planet hunting missions ever. And when these results started to come out, of course, you know, from a SETI perspective, we got very excited about these and wanted to take a look at them. The telescope that we use

the most in our group is in Puerto Rico. It's called the Arecibo telescope. It's 300 meters across and all the data for SETI at home and AstroPulse, the distributed computing projects that we do, come from Arecibo. Still the biggest single dish in the world, right? That's right. Yep, it's the single biggest single aperture telescope on the planet. But unfortunately, because Arecibo is built into the ground, it's actually built into a depression in the ground,

it's fairly limited in the range of the sky that it can see, the part of the sky that it can see. And so we needed to find a new telescope to use to look at these planets. And it was actually kind of a cute story. The very first SETI observations that were ever done were done at an observatory called the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia. And a few years ago was actually the 50th anniversary in 2009 of those very first SETI observations. Dan Wertheimer and I and a whole bunch of other folks were out there for a conference.

And while we were there, we started chatting about the possibility of doing SETI at the Green Bank Observatory again. And we started talking about the Kepler mission and the planets that had been found thus far. And we decided that maybe the new telescope that they have at the Green Bank Observatory would be a fantastic instrument to explore some of these planet candidates. At the time that we undertook these observations, we took the list of all of the planet candidates that had been identified by the Kepler mission, and we selected 86 stars hosting planets that looked especially

interesting to us. The Green Bank Telescope is actually one of the newest radio telescopes on the planet. It's 100 meters across, so not quite as big as Arecibo, but it's fully steerable so it can see a lot larger fraction of the sky, including the field being observed by the Kepler satellite. So we picked 86 of these stars, and we looked at each one of them for five minutes, and then subsequently did the kind of SETI data analysis that we need to do to look for these narrow band signals. These stars, how did they make the cut? I mean, what was special about the planetary systems that they have around them? Well, one of the biggest criteria that we used is we looked for planet candidates,

stars that hosted planet candidates that were in something called the habitable zone. So this is the region around a star where the amount of light that's hitting a planet from the star is such that liquid water could be maintained on the surface of a planet. And we think that liquid water on the surface of a planet is probably one of the most important things for life. Certainly it was one of the most important things, we think, for the development of life on this planet. We also picked stars that had five or more planet candidates going around them, so stars with lots of planets, and also any stars that had a planet that was sort of cursorily similar to the Earth. We've yet to find Earth

2.0, as it's often called. We haven't found an actual kind of sister planet to the Earth, but we picked stars that had an Earth-sized planet with a relatively long orbit. So a few times the radius of the Earth in a period orbit greater than about 50 days. SETI researcher Andrew Simeon. He'll be back with more about the search after our break. This is Planetary Radio.

Hey, hey, Bill Nye here, CEO of the Planetary Radio. two deep questions. Where did we come from? And are we alone? This is the most exciting thing that people do. And together, we can advocate for planetary science and, dare I say it, change the worlds. Hi, this is Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society. We've spent the last year creating an informative, exciting, and beautiful new website. Your place in space is now open for business. You'll find a whole new look with lots of images, great stories, my popular blog, and new blogs from my colleagues and expert guests. And as the world becomes more social, we are too, giving you the opportunity to join in through Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and much more.

It's all at planetary.org. I hope you'll check it out. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. I hope you'll check it out. because the amazing Kepler spacecraft found evidence that each of them is surrounded by multiple planets, and that at least one of these planets at each star is in the so-called habitable zone. Not too hot, not too cold. Just right for the liquid water that life, as we know it, must have. Okay, so the punchline here is you didn't find E.T. No, no,, we haven't. That's the punch

line of the last 50 years or so of modern SETI research. Should we be disturbed by that? I certainly don't think so. The radio spectrum is tremendously large. There's a lot of space there to search. And we're just beginning to have the capability to kind of take a big chunk out of that, take a big bite out of that. In the past, we were only able to look at a few megahertz, maybe 100 megahertz of bandwidth. And now we're able to look at, in this search, we looked at about a gigahertz of bandwidth. And soon we're going to be able to look at tens of gigahertz of bandwidth. And what that translates to is that really we can explore enough of the radio spectrum so that we can really test this hypothesis that advanced civilizations might produce these narrow band radio signals. Now in the material that I read, many of these 86 stars were pretty far away, I mean a thousand or more light years,

Many of these 86 stars were pretty far away, I mean, a thousand or more light years. And it said that really if we were going to detect a signal with this very nice receiver at Green Bank, they still would have had to be directional signals pointed in our direction. And you were only looking at each one for like five minutes. Who's to say that, you know, ET wasn't asleep or pointing someplace else? That's certainly an issue. The limit that we put on the stars that were actually in the Kepler field that had these planets going around that we looked at was for signals that had what we call an equivalent isotropic radiated power of about

10 times the luminosity of the most powerful radio transmitter on Earth. As you pointed out, that radio transmitter that we have on Earth is very, very directional. So while it's very, very bright, it only illuminates a small fraction of the sky. It's possible that if the civilization were a few hundred years, maybe a few thousand years more advanced than our own civilization, they might have a radio transmitter that could release that much energy, but in an isotropic fashion. With regards to detecting a civilization like our own, you're right, the transmitters that they would have would have to be beamed directly at us, and the chances that that would have happened in the short time that we observed the star is pretty

low. But statistically speaking, it's far more likely that the first civilization that we observe the star is pretty low. But statistically speaking, it's far more likely that the first civilization that we encounter is going to be much, much more advanced than our own. So it's possible that they could have transmitters that are very, very bright, but are also capable of illuminating a much larger fraction of the sky than the transmitters we have. And this, of course, because our ability to do this kind of thing is still very, very young, barely 100 years. There are stars that are billions of years older than ours. So it's reasonable to think there, if civilizations got started, they may have started long, long before we started using complex tools like this. That's right. So no signal from these

86. And yet the headline on the press release is intelligent civilizations rarer than one in a million there's a jump there and i want to see how you and your colleagues were able to make that that connection toward setting this limit and i'm i'm not criticizing of course because i love you guys who are filling in the famous drake equation turning those variables into real numbers. And it does seem like you guys have taken a big step in this direction. Sure. So there's actually, there's two limits that we came up with in the paper. The first limit is on civilizations that are marginally more advanced than our own civilization. So that's where the number comes in that something like fewer

than one in a hundred of these Kepler systems with transiting planets have a civilization with a transmitter that's about eight or ten times as bright as the most powerful transmitter that we have on Earth. The one in a million limit comes from considering not just the star that we were targeting, but actually all of the stars that are in the Milky Way galaxy that were within the telescope beam when we were doing these observations. Turns out that a radio telescope beam is actually pretty large on the sky. It doesn't just see the one star that we point at. It sees many stars around that star and all the way out to the edge of the galaxy and indeed past the galaxy.

So to come up with that one in a million limit, we consider all of the stars that were in the telescope beam out to the edge of the Milky Way. The luminosity limit that we came up with was something like 100,000 times the brightest radio transmitter that we have up with was something like a hundred thousand times the the brightest radio transmitter that we have on the earth so these are civilizations that are would have to be much much more advanced than than our own uh capable of producing radio emission that's uh that's much much brighter than anything that we could ever produce on this planet in fact the energetics of that signal would be even more energy than is actually falling on the Earth from the sun. So way more energy than all of the energy in use by all the humans on the Earth several times over.

So this is what we call the Kardashev Type 2 civilizations. So these are civilizations that are capable of using much, much more of the energy from their star than actually falls on their planet. Well, thank you. That certainly clarifies things. When we look at this one in a million, it may seem depressing to some people, but perhaps they are not considering the number of stars we have in our galaxy. Yeah, that's right. I wouldn't say depressing, but it may be discouraging a little bit to have a negative result. But I think there's two things to consider with regard to that limit. One, like you said, 100 billion stars, a few hundred billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy. So saying that one in a million of those, or less than one in a million

of those hosts one of these super civilizations is not an especially significant limit. But I think that the more important thing to consider about this experiment is that we only look at a few places in the sky for five minutes apiece over a fairly narrow range of radio frequencies. five minutes apiece over a fairly narrow range of radio frequencies. And the electromagnetic spectrum is very, very broad. There's lots of different kinds of signals that we might look for. If we consider just radio signals that are within what we call the terrestrial microwave window, so kind of the radio signals that easily get through interstellar space and easily land on the surface of the Earth, we're only looking at something like 10% of that portion of the spectrum. The real way to improve these limits in the future is to look at far more of the radio spectrum than we're looking at now.

Well, what a great segue to why I'm speaking to you while you are in the Netherlands. What are you up to there? There's a brand new telescope that's just coming online in Europe. A large fraction of it is in the Netherlands, and it's called LOFAR. It's a low-frequency radio telescope. And it's really a very cool new telescope. Rather than being built out of dishes like many of the telescopes that we're familiar with are, this telescope is actually

built out of a whole bunch of very simple antennas, dipole antennas on the ground. They might look like TV antennas? That's right, just like TV antennas, huge thousands and thousands of TV antennas. And then the radio telescope is formed digitally within a computer. So the computer is able to take all of these signals from all of these dipole antennas and combine them all so that you get the sensitivity of all of the antennas at once and the angular resolution of the longest baseline between the antennas. And this telescope is sensitive between about 10 megahertz and 250 megahertz. And that's a really interesting place to look from a SETI perspective

because no one has ever looked for SETI signals in that frequency band before. So actually in the next couple weeks, we're going to be conducting the first SETI search ever at that frequency band, and we're very excited about it. So clearly the developments in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence continue. In fact, you were lead author of yet another paper that talked about some of the new technologies that are, what, coming online, about to come online? Yeah, that's right. I think we're really in kind of a magical time for doing SETI work. Every new thing that we're learning in astronomy is telling us that the solar system and the Earth are not particularly unique. And this is something that we've expected, I think, for a long time, that this is kind of the Copernican idea or the principle of mediocrity,

that the Earth and the solar system are not particularly unique. And that's basically what we're finding. Planets are very common. Probably habitable zone planets are common. There's lots of water in the galaxy, lots of complex chemistry. So everything in astronomy and astrophysics is telling us that the stuff that we think we need for life is very, very common. And simultaneous to that, you know, SETI has sort of hitched itself to the Moore's Law of growth in electronics. As computers get faster, it almost directly increases our ability to do more and more effective SETI searches. Just like the computer that you have is 10 times as powerful as the one that you had

a few years ago, the SETI searches that we conduct today are 10 times as powerful as the SETI searches that we conducted a few years ago, the SETI searches that we conduct today are 10 times as powerful as the SETI searches that we conducted a few years ago. And that's really an amazing thing because it's putting us in a position where in the next five to 10 years, we're going to be able to conduct SETI searches that are going to essentially be able to explore the entire radio spectrum and the entire sky much more completely than we ever have in the past. You know that there's a huge interstellar Internet all based on neutrinos.

Yeah, you know, there's this analogy that's often quoted by folks in the SETI community that the kind of searching that we do is much like the drunk looking for his car keys underneath the street lamp. You know, why does he look there? It's because that's the only place that there's light. And that's true to a certain extent. But electromagnetics are the best thing going. They're the best idea that we have at the moment. If you imagine what you might want for an intentional signal, if you were a very advanced civilization and you wanted to signal other

civilizations, you would want the message to be fast. You'd want it to go as fast as possible. And as far as we know, based on our current understanding of physics, photons travel as fast as information can travel. You'd want it to be relatively cheap, and radio photons especially are very energetically inexpensive. And you'd want it to be easy to receive, easy to distinguish. And narrowband signals in particular are very easy to distinguish from other astrophysical

sources of radiation. So they look pretty good, even though we might say that our technology now is primitive, and certainly it will be considered primitive a thousand years from now. At the moment, it's the best thing going, and I think it still looks pretty good. And let's take that search back to where you started us with talking about SETI at home, because I guess the role of us folks at home with those computers that become ever faster is still playing a pretty important role in picking through these signals. The fact that we have the SETI at home supercomputer available to us allows us to conduct searches that we could never do with

computing technology that we would purchase ourselves. It would cost us literally hundreds of millions of dollars to duplicate that as a supercomputer. Even more interestingly, pretty soon with SETI at home, we're going to be distributing data from other telescopes. So in the past, the only telescope that we distributed data from with SETI at home was Arecibo. But we hope to start distributing data from the Green Bank telescope, actually data from these observations that we just spoke about of these 86 stars, and also perhaps data from this LOFAR telescope in the Netherlands. And the fact that people's computers are getting faster and faster is going to enable some really fantastic searches to be done with those data. Well, we will include the link to SETI at Home for anybody who hasn't checked in in

a while. I have to admit, I let it lapse when I changed computers, but I'm going to need to enroll again. And you can join what has become, I'm guessing still, Andrew, the biggest distributed computing project on Earth. Do you have in front of you there the number of the measure of processing that has been done by all of these citizen scientists who've participated in SETI at Home? As of about six months ago, it was about one and a half times 10 to the 22 floating point operations, really an incredible number. Absolutely incredible. Andrew, you're still pretty young at this, as we said, the third generation of SETI scientists. Do you see yourself happily spending your career looking for extraterrestrial intelligence?

Well, I hope so. I would love to. When I was an undergraduate, as soon as you express any interest in going on to graduate school in astronomy at Berkeley or really any other research university, the first thing that they do is suggest that you get involved in research. And the standard line that they give an undergraduate student is this, you know, look around on the website for the department, find some research that you find interesting, and email the professor. When I got that advice, I went home and I, you know, I was aware of the SETI at home project, but I actually didn't know this was in 2004. I didn't know that that project was at Berkeley. And I went home at about eight or nine

o'clock. I was browsing the web and I found out that there was a SETI program at Berkeley. And it sounds cliche, but it really was like a light bulb went off. And I emailed Dan and I said to him, and I still believe this today, that I couldn't imagine a field of astronomy that I would find more personally or academically fulfilling than SETI. Dan called me the next day and invited me to a meeting, and I haven't looked back since. And if I'm lucky enough to be able to continue to do SETI research for the rest of my career, I'd be very happy. Andrew, happy hunting. And as I say to everybody in your business, I hope you'll drop us a line as soon as you get one dropped to you by E.T.

I will indeed. You'll be at the top of the email list. Thank you, Andrew. Andrew Semien has been our guest on Planetary Radio. He did his undergrad work and earned his Ph.D. at Berkeley and is now a project scientist in the UC Berkeley SETI office, working with people like Dan Wertheimer, who was an early guest on this program, one of our very first guests in the first year of Planetary Radio, happily continuing the search for extraterrestrial intelligence elsewhere in our galaxy. Well, we'll see if we can find some intelligent life around the solar system in our usual search with Bruce Betts.

That's coming up in this week's edition of What's Up just moments away. Bruce Betts is back on the Skype line for this week's edition of What's Up. We have lots of housekeeping stuff this week, and I should get some of this out of the way right up front. Why not? Planetary.org slash howcheap. Why do we mention that? Because the Planetary Society has this great contest going on. You could win a signed, ready-for-framing poster of our little comic

strip about how Bill Nye became the Planetary Guy if you go to planetary.org slash howcheap. All right, we've got Jupiter still dominating the evening sky over in the east, the super bright star-like object. You can also find the not quite as bright bluish object that's lower towards the horizon. That's Sirius, brightest star in the sky, rising in the middle of the night. We've got Saturn in the east looking yellowish and not quite as bright as those other objects I've just mentioned. And you can also see Saturn high overhead in the pre-dawn as well. We move on to this week in space history. It was a week of spacecraft missions for people with a lot of patience. In 2004, European Space Agency launched the Rosetta mission.

It will, after 10 years, next year, reach its primary target, a comet, and begin operations there, including with a small lander. Although, to pass the time, it did have a couple of great asteroid flybys, giving us spiffy data on those. And then in 2007, New Horizons passed Jupiter. New Horizons launched in 2006. We'll get to Pluto, its primary target, in 2015. Did great groovy stuff as it flew by Jupiter as well. And now, Random Space Fact.

So Matt, because of when we recorded the last segment with my class, which by the way you can find at planetary.org slash bets class, we have not talked about the Russian meteor impact that occurred unexpectedly, as well as the 2012 DA14 asteroid flyby. That was pretty amazing, especially those videos showing the asteroid streaking across the sky and then the amazing shockwave and sound of broken glass. Yeah, videos that we shared a few of in the webcast that you did with our boss, Bill Nye, a couple of Fridays ago. It made for quite a show and a very good lesson for the rest of us on Earth.

With apologies to all of you who lost Windows in Chelyabinsk. Chelyabinsk? It did drive home a lesson. It did indeed. To drive it home a little more, a little bit of information about that Russian meteor, which at least last estimate I saw was thought to be about 15 meters, which would probably put it in the tiny asteroid as opposed to very large meteoroid category. It came in and dissipated an energy of about the equivalent of 300 kilotons of TNT,

or a 300 kiloton nuclear explosion. Obviously a different beast, but it gives you an idea it was really, really big. That's about 20 times the kilotonage of the Hiroshima bomb. But it exploded about 20 kilometers up, so it broke apart at that altitude, so about 60,000 feet, dissipating a lot of the energy up at that height. But also, this was about 10 times less energy than was dissipated by the Tunguska event in 1908, or what would have occurred if 2012 DA14 had impacted the planet. All right, let's get on to the other contest,

not the How Cheap contest, but the one that we do every week. A regular trivia contest. We asked you, speaking of 2012 DA14, according to discoverer Jaime Noman, where was the human observer, what type of place, when the discovery of 2012 DA14 was made? How did we do, Matt? This was such fun, and most people got it.

A few people came up with he was on the train because he had mentioned doing observations from the train. Not true in this case. It's much more fun even than being on a high-speed train. The majority of people did get it right. We had a big response. Our winner is Eric Okronik in Potsdam, New York, who said, he put it this way, I love this, on a boat, or if I'm right, on a boat.

He was, right? He was on a sailboat. He was on a sailboat off the coast of Spain using the magic of electronics to look at the data coming down from the La Saga Observatory in central Spain, which he mentioned on Planetary Radio. Yeah, I thought that was rather amusing. Eric, we're going to send you a Planetary Radio t-shirt. We had so many answers from people who got it right and then talked about that's the job they want.

Of course, forgetting that Jaime and his colleagues are not paid to do this. They do it out of love of astronomy and finding these objects. But I love this one from David Janczak. He said, shiver me timbers, Captain Hoist the Sails. This star is coming at us. And he happens to listen to us on WSIU in Carbondale, Illinois. So thanks for that, David. Thanks for the laugh.

What do we got for next time? On what two, and this is the key part, what two planetary bodies does the Polish astronomer Copernicus have craters named after him? Rare to have craters on two different bodies named after you, but he was the Copernicus dude, so that's why I got them. So go to Planetary. I'm going to get this eventually.

Planetary.org slash contract. You really miss the email, don't you? Planetary.org slash contest entry. No, sorry. Planetary.org slash radio contest. Oh, all right. I will not give myself a prize. This is getting ridiculous.

You have until the 4th of March as the year races by. March 4, Monday at 2 p.m. Pacific time to get us that answer and your prize. Remember a couple of weeks ago we said we were going to give away one of these Revenge t-shirts, the Revenge of the Dinosaurs against the Asteroids? We've got another one from our good friends at SMBC Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, that terrific online comic that has become a conglomerate I think they do all kinds of stuff

including selling cool shirts like this you can find them of course at smbc-comics.com Bruce I want to throw in an invitation for people to visit my blog because as you know Matt what are you doing coming up soon

I'm doing something crazy. I'm going to the Atacama Desert. I will be at, well, mostly 10,000 feet and for a little while at 16,500 feet for the inauguration of the ALMA array, radio telescope array, which we talked about recently on this show. I've started a little diary in my blog at planetary.org and I hope people

will, it's an audio blog, I hope people will follow along. I hope it gets really loopy when you're up at 16,000 feet. Yeah, I hope my retinas don't hemorrhage. Oh, oh, oh, gosh, gosh, I could have lived without ever having that image. Say goodnight, Bruce.

Oh, oh, please, something happy to think about. Everybody go out there, look up at the night sky and think about sea lions. Thank you, and goodnight. I don't know why I'm laughing. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society, who joins us every week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California,

and is made possible by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation and by the ever-searching members of the Planetary Society. Clear skies.